Fighting for Champagne: Bubbles and Intellectual Property
“Remember, gentlemen, it’s not just France we’re fighting for, it’s Champagne!” The exact date of the quote attributed to Winston Churchill remains difficult to ascertain. It could stem from 1918, when Churchill was Minister of Munitions, but it could also be from 1940, around the time when he as Prime Minister promised the British nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Whether speaking to fellow members of Parliament or officers about to embark on Operation Overlord, his motivation had not changed from first to second World War. Nor had the enemy. Losing one inch of this valuable territory to Germany was unthinkable. Yet, the land was secondary to what Churchill most likely really wanted his gentlemen to come to the defense of; namely the effervescent wine bearing the same name. Defending the wine (the miniscule champagne) was defending the region (the majuscule Champagne), with La France coming in a distant third.
It is the underlying premise of this project that the fight for champagne is an ongoing one. In 2023, it does not involve bayonets or trenches or air bombardment, but it is still fierce and results from being one of the “most regulated wine areas of the world” (Georgopoulus 2012: 27). In fact, regulation and control—primarily in the shape of intellectual property (IP)—is at the heart of what makes champagne champagne, the defense of which nonetheless involves a whole panoply of strategies from marriage contracts to trade secrets, materializing through local custom, national law, as well as in European and global trade agreements.
Surveying this legal battlefield of regulation that is the northernmost winegrowing region in France, this project asks one main question: who fights for Champagne with the weaponry of intellectual property, how and why? The who ranges from powerful institutions such as Le Comité Interprofessionnel du vin de Champagne to iconic grower champagne makers such as Jacques Selosse. The how is the full arsenal of intellectual property these representatives have at their disposal: from geographical indications (GI), which “authenticate and symbolize an intellectual property right of a label owned collectively by all producers in a region” (Jay & Taylor 2013, n.p.) to trademark law, know-how (savoir-faire) and trade secrets. And then the finale. It is the overarching purpose of this project to answer the third question by unpacking the many cultural, symbolic and economic reasons why champagne is worth fighting for. Reasons that include being an extremely valuable export commodity (60% of the production is sold outside France), since 2015 a UNESCO World Heritage site, a hotly debated topic in global intergovernmental arenas such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), part of a multimillion-dollar luxury industry, and last, but certainly not least, the very embodiment of France and Frenchness.
Eva Hemmungs Wirtén is Professor of Mediated Culture at the Department of Culture and Society, Linköping University, Sweden. She has written extensively on the cultural history of international copyright, the public domain and, more recently, on patents as documents. Her most recent book, Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information was published by University of Chicago Press in 2015. In 2017, she was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant for the project “Patents as Scientific Information, 1895-2020,” (PASSIM), which runs between October 1, 2017, and June 30, 2023.
Tuned into the World. The UNESCO Collection of Traditional Music (1961-1985)
As a symbol of peace and universal harmony, music soon became part of UNESCO’s mission. In 1949, the International Music Council (IMC) was created to promote musical exchanges across political and cultural frontiers. Although it first focused on Western art music, the IMC started to promote Non-Western music at the end of the 1950s. The quest for “authenticity” and the need to preserve “the musical diversity of the world” became a new motto, which led to the realization of the UNESCO Collection of Traditional Music of the World, a series of 130 albums released by Bärenreiter, Philips and EMI from 1961 to 1985.
Drawing on archival materials, as well as interviews with ethnomusicologists who took part in the collection, this paper defends a “micro-global” approach to music. It explores the role of UNESCO as a driving force of musical globalization, pushing the record industry towards the Global South two decades before the success of world music, but also its limits. In fact, the musical world promoted by UNESCO was far from being universal. Political pressures as well as the quest for “authenticity” led to the exclusion of entire regions and styles, working as a factor of both connectivity and disconnectivity.
Anaïs Fléchet is associate professor at the University of Paris Saclay (UVSQ), member of the Research Team Centre d’histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines. Her work focuses on music and international history, cultural globalization and Latin American music. She has published several books and articles on these subjects, including: Cultural History in France. Local Debates, Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2019), Histoire culturelle du Brésil (IHEAL éditions, 2019); Littératures et musiques dans la mondialisation (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015); “Musique et relations internationales” (special issue of Relations internationales, 2013/3-4). She is currently completing a new book on Unesco and music during the Cold War.
Practical information
The seminar will be organized as a hybrid event at Håndbiblioteket on the 5th floor in Niels Treschow’s hus, University of Oslo. After the seminar, the History of Capitalism research group invites all participants to continue the conversation over dinner. If you want to join us for dinner after the seminar, please register your attendance by 12.00 on Friday March 10.
Register for dinner after the seminar
Join us on Zoom by following this link.
About the event
This event is part of Creative IPR and History of Capitalism's series of open seminars. The research group and project hosts open seminars on the last Monday of every month. This is a public research seminar bringing together researchers and other professionals from across the social sciences, law, the humanities and beyond to present their research or field of expertise followed by a Q&A session.
As of spring 2022, seminars will be hybrid, with the option to attend on Zoom and in person. The seminars are open to all.